The transmission of video content over communications networks, such as the Internet, has increased dramatically in recent years. While the use of communications networks for video transmission provides several advantages, the bandwidth and other constraints of such networks may often force a number of limitations and trade-offs. For example, some clients with more favorable transmission characteristics (e.g., better network conditions, more robust processing and memory resources, etc.) may often be able to receive and present video with higher image quality, while clients with less favorable conditions (e.g., poorer network conditions, less robust processing and memory resources, etc.) may often be forced to receive and present video with lower image quality in order to avoid transmission delays and errors. One approach for handling these trade-offs is to generate, by a server, a number of transmission streams that are encoded at different image qualities (e.g., different encoding bitrates, different resolutions, etc.) with respect to one another and to allow connected clients to select a video stream that best fits their particular respective transmission characteristics. However, one drawback of this approach is that encoding of these multiple video streams may consume large amounts of processing and other server resources. For pre-stored and/or non-live video content (e.g., certain on-demand content), this may be less problematic as the pre-encoding of the multiple streams may be spread over time prior to transmission. However, for live video content, the burden of simultaneously encoding multiple video quality streams, for potentially large quantities of different content items, may be particularly disadvantageous and may potentially exhaust available server resources.